by Jay Shetty
The Dhammapada is a collection of verses probably collected by Buddha’s disciples. In it, the Buddha says, “As irrigators lead water where they want, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their minds.” True growth requires understanding the mind. It is the filter, judge, and director of all our experiences, but, as evidenced by the conflict I felt on my shower adventure, we are not always of one mind. The more we can evaluate, understand, train, and strengthen our relationship with the mind, the more successfully we navigate our lives and overcome challenges.
This battle in our mind is waged over the smallest daily choices (Do I have to get up right now?) and the biggest (Should I end this relationship?). All of us face such battles every single day.
A senior monk once told me an old Cherokee story about these dilemmas which all of us agonize over: “An elder tells his grandson, ‘Every choice in life is a battle between two wolves inside us. One represents anger, envy, greed, fear, lies, insecurity, and ego. The other represents peace, love, compassion, kindness, humility, and positivity. They are competing for supremacy.’
“ ‘Which wolf wins?’ the grandson asks. ‘The one you feed,’ the elder replies.”
“But how do we feed them?” I asked my teacher.
The monk said, “By what we read and hear. By who we spend time with. By what we do with our time. By where we focus our energy and attention.”
The Bhagavad Gita states, “For him who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends; but for one who has failed to do so, his very mind will be the greatest enemy.” The word enemy may seem too strong to describe the voice of dissent in your head, but the definition rings true: An enemy, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a person who is actively opposed or hostile to someone or something,” and “a thing that harms or weakens something.” Sometimes our own minds work against us. They convince us to do something, then make us feel guilty or bad about it, often because it’s gone against our values or morals.
A pair of researchers from Princeton University and the University of Waterloo have shown that the weight of a bad decision isn’t just metaphorical. They asked study participants to remember a time they’d done something unethical, then asked them to rate their perception of their body weight. People who’d been asked to recall an unethical action said they felt physically heavier than those who’d been asked to recall a neutral memory. Other times we want to focus on something—a project at work, an artistic endeavor, a home repair, a new hobby—and our minds just won’t let us get around to it. When we procrastinate, there’s a conflict between what researchers call our “should-self,” or what we feel we should do because it’s good for us, and our “want-self,” what we actually want to do in the moment. “I know I should get started on that business proposal, but I want to watch the US Open quarterfinals.”
Before I became a monk, my own mind stopped me from doing what I loved because it was too risky. It allowed me to consume a chocolate bar and a liter of soda daily even though I wanted to be healthy. It made me compare myself to other people instead of concentrating on my own growth. I blocked myself from reaching out to people I had hurt because I did not want to appear weaker. I allowed myself to be angry at people I loved because I cared more about being right than being kind. In the introduction to his translation of the Dhammapada, Eknath Easwaran writes that in our everyday swirl of thoughts “we have no more idea of what life is really like than a chicken has before it hatches. Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain, are storms in a tiny, private, shell-bound realm which we take to be the whole of existence.” It makes sense, then, that when the Buddha finally reached “the realm utterly beyond the reach of thought,” he described feeling like a chick breaking out of its shell.
At the ashram, I learned something that has been crucial in curbing these dangerous, self-destructive thoughts. Our thoughts are like clouds passing by. The self, like the sun, is always there. We are not our minds.
THE PARENT AND THE CHILD
As my teachers explained, visualizing the mind as a separate entity helps us work on our relationship with it—we can think of the interaction as making a friend or negotiating peace with an enemy.
As in any interaction, the quality of our communication with the mind is based on the history of our relationship with it. Are we hotheaded combatants or stubborn and unwilling to engage? Do we have the same arguments over and over again, or do we listen and compromise? Most of us don’t know the history of this internal relationship because we’ve never taken the time to reflect on it.
The monkey mind is a child and the monk mind is an adult. A child cries when it doesn’t get what it wants, ignoring what it already has. A child struggles to appreciate real value—it would happily trade a stock certificate for some candy. When something challenges us in some way, the childlike mind reacts immediately. Maybe you feel insulted and make a sour face, or you start defending yourself. A conditioned, automatic reaction like this is ideal if someone pulls out a knife. You feel scared, and you bolt. But it’s not ideal if we’re being emotionally defensive because someone has said something we don’t want to hear. We don’t want to be controlled by automatic reactions in every case, nor do we want to eliminate the child mind altogether. The child mind enables us to be spontaneous, creative, and dynamic—all invaluable qualities—but when it rules us, it can be our downfall.
The impulsive, desire-driven child mind is tempered by the judicious, pragmatic adult mind, which says, “That’s not good for you,” or “Wait until later.” The adult mind reminds us to pause and assess the bigger picture, taking time to weigh the default reaction, decide if it’s appropriate, and propose other options. The intelligent parent knows what the child needs versus what it wants and can decide what is better for it in the long term.
Framing inner conflict this way—parent and child—suggests that when the childlike mind is fully in control it’s because our monk mind has not been developed, strengthened, or heard. The child gets frustrated, throws tantrums, and we quickly give in to it. Then we get mad at ourselves. Why am I doing this? What is wrong with me?
The parent is the smarter voice. If well trained, it has self-control, reasoning power, and is a debating champ. But it can only use the strength that we give it. It’s weaker when tired, hungry, or ignored.
When the parent isn’t supervising, the child climbs on the counter near the hot stove to get to the cookie jar, and trouble follows. On the other hand, if the parent is too controlling, the child gets bitter, resentful, and risk-averse. As with all parent-child relationships, striking the right balance is an ongoing challenge.
This, then, is the first step to understanding our minds—simply becoming aware of the different voices inside us. Starting to differentiate what you’re hearing will immediately help you make better decisions.
DRIVE THE CHARIOT OF THE MIND
When you begin to sort out the multiple voices in your head, the level of conflict may surprise you. It doesn’t make sense. Our minds should work in our own best interest. Why would we stand in our own way? The complication is that we are weighing input from different sources: our five senses, telling us what appeals in the moment; our memories, recalling what we have experienced in the past; and our intellects, synthesizing and evaluating the best choice for the long term.
Beyond the parent-child model, the monk teachings have another analogy for the competing voices in our heads. In the Upanishads the working of the mind is compared to a chariot being driven by five horses. In this analogy, the chariot is the body, the horses are the five senses, the reins are the mind, and the charioteer is the intellect. Sure, this description of the mind is more complicated, but bear with me.
In the untrained state, the charioteer (the intellect) is asleep on the job, so the horses (the senses) have control of the reins (mind) and lead the body wherever they please. Horses, left to their own devices, react to what’s around them.
They see a tasty-looking shrub, they bend to eat it. Something startles them, they spook. In the same way, our senses are activated in the moment by food, money, sex, power, influence, etc. If the horses are in control, the chariot veers off the road in the direction of temporary pleasure and instant gratification.
In the trained state, the charioteer (the intellect) is awake, aware, and attentive, not allowing the horses to lead the way. The charioteer uses the reins of the mind to carefully steer the chariot along the correct route.
MASTER THE SENSES
Think about those five unruly horses, harnessed to the chariot of a lazy driver, snorting and tossing their heads impatiently. Remember that they represent the five senses, always our first point of contact with the external. The senses are responsible for our desires and attachments, and they pull us in the direction of impulsivity, passion, and pleasure, destabilizing the mind. Monks calm the senses in order to calm the mind. As Pema Chödrön says, “You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.”
Shaolin monks are a wonderful example of how we can train our minds to subdue the senses. (Note: I never lived or trained as a Shaolin monk, although I might want to try!)
The Shaolin Temple in China dates back more than fifteen hundred years, and Shaolin monks regularly demonstrate the impossible. They balance on the blade of a sword, break bricks with their heads, and lie on beds of nails and blades without apparent effort or injury. It seems like magic, but the Shaolin monks actually push their limits through rigorous physical and mental regimes.
Children may begin study at the Shaolin monastery as early as age three. They spend long days in training and meditation. Through breathing techniques and Qi Gong, an ancient healing technique, the monks develop the ability to accomplish superhuman feats of strength and to endure uncomfortable situations—from attack to injury. By cultivating their inner calm, they can ward off mental, physical, and emotional stress.
It’s not only the Shaolin monks who’ve demonstrated incredible sensory control. Researchers took a different group of monks, along with people who’d never meditated, and secured a thermal stimulator to their wrists—a device designed to induce pain through intense heat. The plate warms slowly, then stays at maximum heat for ten seconds before cooling. During the experiment, as soon as the plate began to heat, the pain matrix in the non-monks’ brains started firing like crazy, as if the plate were already at maximum heat. Researchers call this “anticipatory anxiety,” and the monks showed none of it. Instead, as the plate heated, their brain activity remained pretty much the same. When the plate reached full heat, activity in the monks’ brains spiked, but only in areas that registered the physical sensations of pain. You see for most of us, pain is a twofold sensation—we feel some of it physically and some of it emotionally. For the monks the heat was painful, but they didn’t assign negative feelings to the experience. They felt no emotional pain. Their brains also recovered from the physical pain faster than the non-meditators.
This is a remarkable level of sensory control—more than most of us are committed to developing—but do think about your senses as paths to the mind. Most of our lives are governed by what we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. If you smell your favorite dessert, you want to eat it. If you see photo of a beach, you start daydreaming about vacation. You hear a certain phrase and flash to the person who used to say it all the time.
The monkey mind is reactive, but the monk mind is proactive. Let’s say that whenever you go on YouTube to watch one video, you end up going down a rabbit hole. You drift from a cute animal video to a shark attack compilation, and before you know it you’re watching Sean Evans eating hot sauce with a celebrity guest. Senses recklessly transport our minds away from where we want them to be. Don’t tease your own senses. Don’t set yourself up to fail. A monk doesn’t spend time in a strip club. We want to minimize the mind’s reactive tendencies, and the easiest way to do that is for the intellect to proactively steer the senses away from stimuli that could make the mind react in ways that are hard to control. It’s up to the intellect to know when you’re vulnerable and to tighten the reins, just as a charioteer does when going through a field of tasty grass.
Any sensory input can trigger emotions—a tempting or upsetting or sad reminder that lures those wild horses off the charioteer’s chosen path. Social media might suck away time you wanted to spend otherwise; a photo might remind you of a lost friend in a moment when you don’t have time for grief; an ex’s sweatshirt might re-break your heart. Within reason, I recommend removing unwanted sensory triggers from your home (or deleting the apps). As you do, visualize yourself removing them from your mind. You can do the same thing when you hit an unwanted mental trigger—a word that you used to hear from a parent, a song from your past. Visualize yourself removing that from your life as you would a physical object. When you remove those mental and physical triggers, you can stop giving in to them. Needless to say, we can never remove all senses and all triggers. Nor would we want to. Our goal is not to silence the mind or even to still it. We want to figure out the meaning of a thought. That’s what helps us let go. But temporarily, while we’re strengthening our relationship with our minds, we can take steps to avoid triggering places and people by adjusting what we see, listen to, read, absorb.
From a monk’s perceptive, the greatest power is self-control, to train the mind and energy, to focus on your dharma. Ideally, you can navigate anything that seems tough, challenging, or fun with the same balance and equanimity, without being too excited in pleasure or too depressed by pain.
Ordinarily our brains turn down the volume on repeated input, but when we train our minds, we build the ability to focus on what we want regardless of distractions.
Meditation is an important tool that allows us to regulate sensory input, but we can also train the mind by building the relationship between the child and the adult mind. When a parent says, “Clean your room,” and the child doesn’t, that’s like your monk mind saying, “Change your course,” and the monkey mind saying, “No thanks, I’d rather listen to loud music on my headphones.” If the parent gets angry at the child and says, “I told you to clean your room! Why haven’t you done it yet?” the child retreats further. Eventually, the child may follow orders, but the exchange hasn’t built a connection or a dialogue.
The more a frustrated parent and petulant child do battle, the more alienated from each other they feel. When you are fighting an internal battle, your monkey mind is an adversary. View it as a collaborator, and you can move from battle to bond, from rejected enemy to trusted friend. A bond has its own challenges—there can still be disagreement—but at least all parties want the same outcome.
In order to reach such a collaboration, our intellect must pay closer attention to the automatic, reactive patterns of the mind, otherwise known as the subconscious.
THE STUBBORN SUBCONSCIOUS
The mind already has certain instinctive patterns that we never consciously chose. Imagine you have an alarm on your phone set to ring at the same time every morning. It’s an excellent system until a national holiday comes along, and the alarm goes off anyway. That alarm is like our subconscious. It’s already been programmed and defaults to the same thoughts and actions day after day. We live much of our lives following the same path we’ve always taken, for better or worse, and these thoughts and behaviors will never change unless we actively reprogram ourselves.
Joshua Bell, a world-famous violinist, decided to busk outside a DC subway station during the morning rush hour. Playing on a rare and precious instrument, he opened up his case for donations and performed some of the most difficult pieces ever written for the violin. In about forty-five minutes, barely anyone stopped to listen or donate. He made about $30. Three days before the subway performance he had played the same violin at Boston’s Symphony Hall, where the decent seats went for $100.
There are many reasons people might not stop to hear a brilliant musician playing, but one of them is certainly
that they were on autopilot, powering through the rush hour crowds. How much do we miss when we’re in default mode?
“Insanity is doing the same thing again and again, expecting different results.” (This quote is often attributed to Einstein, although there’s no proof that he ever said it.) How many of us do the same thing, year after year, hoping our lives will transform?
Thoughts repeat in our minds, reinforcing what we believe about ourselves. Our conscious isn’t awake to make edits. The narration playing in your mind is stuck in its beliefs about relationships, money, how you feel about yourself, how you should behave. We all have had the experience of someone saying, “You look amazing today,” and our subconscious responding, “I don’t look amazing. They’re saying that to be nice.” When someone says, “You really deserved that,” perhaps you say to yourself, “Oh no, I’m not sure I can do it again.” These habitual reactions pepper our days. Change begins with the words inside your head. We are going to work on hearing, curating, choosing, and switching our thoughts.